The Great Global Warming Swindle was first shown in Britain in March 2007 and an edited version will be shown tonight on the ABC.

The original version presented scientific arguments that were topical in the 1990s but, in many cases, subsequently shown to be incorrect — often by the same scientists that suggested them in the first place. Science has moved on substantially since then. The documentary does not show how these early arguments have since been discredited and replaced.

This is deceitful journalism, but very well presented and therefore capable of hoodwinking viewers who have not had the more recent scientific evidence presented to them. Why not do a little “homework” first, then watch the documentary and pick out the flaws?

How many of the following errors and misrepresentations will be in the version shown in Australia that remain from the version shown in England:

  1. The temperature record for the 20th century that is attributed to “NASA” bears no resemblance to the actual global mean temperature curve from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA). Readers can check the NASA source themselves and decide which graph is correct. The use of an incorrect temperature curve makes for good comparisons with some other data sets …. plotted against the correct global mean temperature curve the comparisons are not convincing.
  2. The documentary claimed that temperature changes are caused by sunspot activity and has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. Not even the scientist, upon whose work the graph shown is based, agrees with this anymore: the more recent science and conclusions of Eigil Friis-Christensen, who made comments in the documentary, were excluded from the documentary.
  3. John Christy makes comments that the warming of the troposphere was less than the surface of the Earth, contrary to predictions if greenhouse gases were causing the warming. However, he was a lead author on a US Climate Change Science Project report in 2006 that stated “This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.”
  4. The documentary says that, in the past, temperature increases preceded CO2 increases; therefore, present-day CO2 increases cannot be causing global warming. This is nonsense – no one uses this evidence to show that CO2 is causing global warming. Every good climate model represents not only the past temperature/CO2 offsets but also the present changes where increasing CO2 is the driving force causing current temperature increases.
  5. It was argued that global mean temperature actually fell for a while during the 1940s-1970s but CO2 levels in the atmosphere were still rising; therefore, they cannot be causing temperature increases if the temperature was decreasing. The driving force for the decreases was the increase of aerosols in the atmosphere, something that is well understood and is modelled well by the global climate models.

Will Australians be served up the same falsified and outdated scientific misrepresentations as were shown to the British public in March 2007?

With just a few minutes spent reading original source information available on the internet, Australian viewers can inform themselves first, then sit back and watch the show.